Thorough network upgrade underpins University of Law’s IT

The University of Law (ULaw), the UK’s longest established independent specialist provider of legal education services, has completed a major upgrade to its core network, datacentre and wireless infrastructure to support a thriving business across multiple locations.

ULaw specialises in the Legal Practice Course (LPC), a postgraduate, vocational course that represents the final step towards becoming a solicitor in England and Wales, which makes up 80% of its business. It also offers bar council courses, legal diplomas, and is looking to add more courses around business and law.

It already works with 90 of the UK’s top legal practices and has trained over 60,000 lawyers to date at its locations in London, Birmingham, Bristol, Chester, Guildford, Manchester and Leeds. It is owned by Global University Systems.

CIO Tom Brady first joined the business in May 2014, after a stint in charge of IT services at optical equipment supplier Carl Zeiss, just as ULaw was considering an upgrade to its IT with a specific emphasis on underpinning its infrastructure to make it fit for the future.

Brady immediately set about conducting an audit of the university’s existing IT infrastructure, including surveying students and staff.

“It became obvious there had been considerable underinvestment, and a number of issues were causing pain for both staff and students,” he told Computer Weekly.

Among other things, he found inadequate storage, an ageing Novell-based email system, weak Wi-Fi networks and consistent server outages that was damaging the student experience at a time when ULaw was experiencing massive competition from rival institutions.

More worryingly, said Brady, a single point-of-failure at its one datacentre was limiting ULaw’s disaster recovery capability, putting the institution at considerable risk, while ULaw’s 44-strong IT team was up to the task, but were “doing too much fire-fighting”.

“There was a real and urgent need to rebuild from the ground up and implement more effective collaboration,” he said.

An immediate priority was to build out a more resilient datacentre architecture to enable the introduction of fully virtualised applications, improving performance and resilience, and bringing ULaw’s disaster recovery procedures back up to code.

Brady has now taken space in the Telehouse West facility in London’s Docklands to manage day-to-day operations and some backup, and is using its old datacentre to backup.

Working with Roc Technologies, ULaw completely overhauled its campus network, delivering new cabling, and both a fibre backbone and secure wireless networks around its distributed sites. This element of the upgrade took six months, and was one of the more complex parts of the process, particularly in its older sites – its Guildford base is a listed building, for example, while in all locations much of the work had to be done at night to minimise disruption to ULaw’s daily academic life.

“There were several unknowns, such as asbestos in some places, and we had to work around the curriculum,” said Brady. “We can say there was no impact to student services, but we hadn’t initially reckoned on some of these challenges.”